Zimbabwe Plans to Nationalise All Farmland
Date: 10-Jun-04
Country: ZIMBABWE
Author: Stella Mapenzauswa
A leading commercial farming group said the move was effectively a continuation of the government's drive to seize white-owned farms and could further alienate bank funding for commercial agriculture after several years of food shortages.
"The government has stepped up efforts to acquire more land with the sole objective of nationalising all productive farmland, from crop fields to conservancies, in the country," Nkomo told the official Herald newspaper on Tuesday.
"In the end all land shall be state land and there will be no such thing called private land," Nkomo said, urging all landowners to offer their land so that they could be considered for the leases.
Nkomo could not be reached by Reuters for comment on Tuesday.
The Zimbabwean government has forced about two-thirds of Zimbabwe's 4,500 white commercial farmers off their land in the past four years under President Robert Mugabe's controversial programme to resettle landless blacks on the plots, agricultural officials say.
"This talk of nationalisation is nothing new. The Land Acquisition Act is about nationalisation of land which has been the government intention all along," said John Worsley-Worswick, vice chairman of farmers' group Justice for Agriculture, which has opposed the land seizures.
Farm output has fallen sharply over the past four years, causing food shortages which Mugabe's opponents blame largely on his land seizure policy, but which government officials attribute to economic sabotage and bad weather.
The Herald's report did not give a schedule for the nationalisation programme, but said the government would issue 99-year leases, referred to as "in perpetuity", for productive farmland and 25-year leases for wildlife and conservation areas.
"The fundamentals of land tenure is that it has to be legal, transferable. That is not going to happen in this case and no one will want to lend money to farmers without title deeds. The government is hell-bent on destroying commercial agriculture," Worsley-Worswick said.
LAND REFORMS CRITICISED
The government has forcibly acquired 259 mostly white-owned farms since January and given notice it plans to seize 918 more.
It has also confiscated agricultural equipment and machinery authorities said was lying idle on the farms and allocated it to black Zimbabweans resettled on the land.
The land reforms have drawn criticism mostly from Western countries, but Mugabe argues the programme is necessary to restore land to blacks dispossessed when Britain colonised the country over a century ago and white farmers took the best farmland.
Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980, has vowed to pay compensation only for improvements on the farms that are taken over, saying it is Britain's responsibility to compensate dispossessed farmers for the land itself.
